International Musicology Conference Music Composition In Chile TENDENCIES, CONFLICTS AND PERSPECTIVES International Society for Chilean Music With the support of ChileGlobal November 24 & 25, 2017 | mica | Vienna, Austria The Conference The SIMUC aims to promote Chilean music, musicians and musicologists, that is to say, composition, performance and theory. I think it is crucial to support these three areas and create the circumstances for them to support each other. In this sense, we are always encouraging Chilean performers to play music from Chilean composers in our concerts. In the same way, we have made several calls for works to encourage Chilean composers to let their work be performed and premiere by Chilean musicians. Today is the turn of Chilean musicologists! In this conference we are very happy to have five Chilean music scholars who will talk about Chilean music, about being a composer in Chile, the working conditions of musicians in Chile, Chilean identity, etc.. I think nobody can analyze these topics better than those who are part of the same culture, who have grown up in the same society as their fellow musicians. This is a kind of knowledge that you cannot get in the Academia. There are many performers-composers, musicologists-performers and an increasing number of composers-researchers. At the conference, a Chilean composer will present one of his pieces and will bring the creator's perspective into the discussion. In addition, an Austrian cultural scientist will address more global aspects and give us an external reference. The conference will be complemented with interesting information from SIMUC's database, the premiere of our documentary film about the Chilean music scene, which was recently produced in Chile specially for this occasion, the live-streaming, the active participation from colleagues from Chile and other parts of the world through social media, and marvellous coffee breaks for networking. I would like to thank the SIMUC team, all the presenters who came from different parts of the world to share their knowledge, the great musicians who participated on our film, all our collaborators and specially ChileGlobal for their financial support. Javier Party Composer [email protected] Javier Party is a Chilean composer. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He studied composition in Chile and Germany. His music has been performed worldwide. He is the president of the International Society for Chilean Music (SIMUC). 2 The Central Topic Music composition in Chile was during most of the 20th century an academic practice. Most Chilean composers officially considered as such were and have been university professors, and it is common in Chile to define contemporary classical music simply as “academic music”. However, since the return to democracy three decades ago, new scenes and movements have reshaped this panorama: music composition is taught in more places, state funding has supported music composition beyond academia, and new generations have been trying to escape old practices in different ways. An important number of Chilean composers have also studied or work abroad, mainly in Europe. In the year 2016, the election of Vicente Bianchi as the first non- academic composer recipient of the National Prize for Music, created an important crisis about who is or can be a composer, and how music composition has been defined in the last century. This first SIMUC musicology conference takes this “crisis” of local music composition, and the idea and practice of the composer in Chile and of Chilean music, to discuss the discipline, creators, relations with audiences and the space institutions occupy today in the world of music creation. Some of the questions we want to explore in the conference are: Who has written music in Chile, and why? How has music composition been defined in Chile, and by whom? Who is considered a composer in Chile? What could be considered Chilean in the written music tradition of Chile, and what would be a Chilean music composition? Is there an identity of Chilean music composition? How have these problems changed in time? 3 The Program Friday 16:00 Gathering Opening 16:15 Javier Party KEYNOTE Músicas académicas : Framing the Chilean composer p. 7 16:30 of the 20 th century. José Manuel Izquierdo 17:15 Coffeebreak & Networking SIMUC – FILM 1 Being a composer in Chile & the Chilean identity in 17:30 music. SIMUC PANEL DISCUSSION 1 Composition in Chile: Tendencies, conflicts and 17:45 perspectives. With José Manuel Izquierdo, Eileen Karmy, Pablo Palacios and Carlos Zamora. Moderated by Javier Party 4 Saturday 9:30 Gathering PRESENTATION 1 South of the border with Disney. North American 9:45 cultural industry, pan-Americanism and some p. 8 questions about identity in Chilean art music. Juan Carlos Poveda PRESENTATION 2 El comercio va invadiendo el arte : Being a film music p. 9 10:30 composer in Chile. Martín Farías SIMUC – FILM 2 11:15 The Chilean music scene. SIMUC 11:30 Coffeebreak & Networking PRESENTATION 3 Composers and intellectual activities in the Chilean p. 10 11:45 academic music: the Gustavo Becerra experience. Pablo Palacios MUSIC & COMPOSER'S PRESENTATION 12:30 Flute Quartet Nº1. Being a Chilean composer abroad. p. 11 Carlos Zamora 13:15 Lunchbreak 5 14:30 Gathering PRESENTATION 4 Musicians as workers: a provocative perspective to 14:45 understand the working lives of musicians beyond p. 12 popular and classical. Eileen Karmy SIMUC – FILM 3 Erudite, classical, academic, art music, music of 15:30 written tradition? SIMUC PRESENTATION 5 What enables composing? Empirical investigations p. 13 15:45 and analyses. Tasos Zembylas 16:30 Coffeebreak & Networking SIMUC - DATABASE 16:45 Some numbers the Chilean music scene p. 14 Daygoro Serón PANEL DISCUSSION 2 Composition in Chile: Tendencies, conflicts and perspectives. With José Manuel Izquierdo, Eileen 17:00 Karmy, Pablo Palacios, Tasos Zembylas and Carlos Zamora. Moderated by Javier Party 6 Músicas académicas : Framing the Chilean composer of the 20th century. José Manuel Izquierdo In Chile, most people tend to describe “classical music” as “academic music”, música académica, a rather adept symbol of the construction of the composer -and musical composition- in terms of an academic activity. For most of the 20th century, that was indeed the case for Chilean composers, when musical composition was overwhelmingly dominated by the Universidad de Chile, with very few and rare exceptions. While Chile had a conservatoire since 1850 -the second oldest in Latin America-, in which composition was also being taught at least since the 1880s, the conservatoire was scrapped in the 1920s in favour of a new model of musical institution, sustained by a university. Central to the debate was the question of who is a composer, and what is a “composition”, creating a shift from a perspective of the composer as craftsmen to that of artist, changing local aesthetics and aesthetics assumptions. A new law in 1941 finally consecrated to the Universidad de Chile the role of control over artistic musical life in Chile, further cementing a specific idea of “composer” through new institutions: the national symphonic orchestra, a musicological journal, festivals for new music, a national prize for composers with a lifelong government- funded pension. Looking back, it is inevitable to see that this framework has shaped Chilean musical composition and what a composer is -or isn’t-, even until our own days. Many composers of that period are still alive, and overwhelmingly -almost solely- the national prize for music has been given to composers from university circles. In this paper, however, I want to look critically not only at how that framework operated, what models of composer of composition it created or sustained, and also at the musicians who tried to break with that model in different ways. Who was considered a composer, and who was trying to reframe that question? Using different sources, I will trace that question through several decades, including the extension and articulation of the model during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and its progressive collapse since the 1990s under the weight of new mediums, voices, cultural institutions, scenes and opportunities for funding. José Manuel Izquierdo Musicologist [email protected] José Manuel Izquierdo studied musicology in Chile and graduated with a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. His work has been mostly on Chilean and Andean composers from the 19th and 20th centuries, and is currently working on transnational opera in the region. For his research, which has been published in various journals and in the form of three books, he has received several awards including the Otto Mayer Serra Prize, the Ruspoli Prize and also the Tesi Rossiniane Prize for his PhD dissertation. He currently works at the Universidad Católica de Chile. 7 South of the border with Disney. North American cultural industry, pan americanism and some questions about identity in Chilean art music. Juan Carlos Poveda In 1941, in the context of a Pan Americanist project and the production of World War II-era propaganda, Walt Disney and a professional team of 18 people – including one composer- made a trip across Latin America for two months, in order to learn about different cultural aspects of Latin American countries. The result of this experience was the documentary South of the Border and the animated film Saludos Amigos. Chile was one stop on this journey, and the official person to